Yelp Takes On Foursquare in Latest iPhone App Upgrade

Yelp has added a “check-in” feature to its latest iPhone app upgrade It’s a direct challenge to the hot startup Foursquare, whose core function is letting others know where you go and when you’re there.

Yelp has always encouraged members to review the places they’ve gone, and to use the reviews of other members to pick places to go. But its feel was always more database than real-time social network, good for the discovery of destinations but not for putting together an ad hoc meetup. That was the Big Idea of Foursquare, which caught fire at last year’s connectivity-challenged South by Southwest.

Yelp isn’t even bothering to hide its direct aping of FourSquare with version 4.0.0 of its iPhone app, which allows you to “‘Check-in’ to businesses when you are out to tell your friends where you are.” That’s the exact same language Foursquare uses to encourage users to report their location.

There’s more of the same. Yelp won’t anoint you the “mayor” of any location in the playful parlance of Foursquare — an honor that bestows the same privileges as having that star named for you — but you can become a “regular” and get “showcased” at a business.

It’s not all mimicry, however.

Yelp has also extended its augmented-reality feature called Monocle, which superimposes restaurant names and ratings in your iPhone’s camera view. Now you can locate friends from their reported locations as well, which will show up alongside as floating icons showing POIs, where they are and their ratings.

But some drawbacks remain. It’s still not possible to review an item within the app itself — you have to log into the site using Safari.

Maybe giving people a reason to forgo Foursquare and come back to Yelp was a tactical imperative, but that sloppy implementation is surely a big disincentive for the sort of spontaneity that really powers mobile apps. That should have been addressed in a release which the company calls “a big one.”

Location plus presence awareness is hot right now, with Google’s recent release of the Near Me Now function on iPhone and Android handsets. But it may take a while before Yelp reaches a critical mass in the Here I am! sweepstakes by stealing hearts and minds from Foursquare, which also lets users leave comments about places they’ve been, albeit in a less rigorous way.

The missing piece now is tying up with the businesses themselves. Ideally, that means when I announce — using an app — that I have arrived, the waiter who invariably tells me his name will also greet me with mine as he hands me the martini he already knows I want.